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83. Photopia (1998, Inform 7)
[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]83. Photopia Creator: Adam Cadre Genre: Text Adventure Year: 1998 Platforms: Platforms: Inform 5 (<a href="https://www.ifwiki.org/Z-code_interpreters">Interpreters</a> for Inform games, which descended from the format Infocom originally used so you can play them on anything.) <a href="https://www.mobygames.com/game/3017/photopia/">Mobygames link</a> Available through: <a href="https://adamcadre.ac/if/photo201.zip">Direct Link </a> but also listed <a href="https://adamcadre.ac/if/">here</a>. I make text adventure games, it is my favorite genre of game. I tried to make sure the list did not contain them in overwhelming numbers, but Photopia must be here. If you take Colossal Cave, Adventure and Zork I: The Great Underground Empire as the first few popular examples of the genre, they have been around for 50+ years. 50 years is a long time. I can personally see the technology crack a little, not in so much as games reacting to the correct things a player types - a dedicated author has a response for everything, and that is something that Adam's games excel at - but the frustrations of interpreting player input <i>into</i> what the game understands is starting to creak when you realize that an AI MCP and Gemini key can do things like analyze output for correctness when it comes to text, easily. Part of playing text adventures was understanding that receiving no feedback or "I can't do that"-type messages was part of playing the game. There are not necessary "puzzles" in the classic sense of the word in Photopia. There are obstacles. It kicked off a (re?)awakening of what text adventure games could be, popularizing game authors going another way rather than loading up puzzles for the sake of themselves. And there is a clever implementation when it comes to talking to other characters. You type in <b>>talk to Rob</b> down below in the screenshot, and you get to pick one of three choices. This does get around the illusion that the > prompt attempts to provide where it can handle anything. The limitation here provides for a better game experience in this implementation. I'd be ruining it for you if I spoke more about the plot and story of Photopia. It is an hour-long game and is the least "get frustrated and stuck" text game I've ever played. <img src="https://www.caltrops.com/images/top100/photopia01.png">[/quote]